Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 19

The correct answer is B, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. The MNRE is the nodal ministry for the mission, frames the guidelines for each of its components and notified the Green Hydrogen Standard for India in August 2023. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Power handles generation, transmission and distribution of electricity; the Bureau of Energy Efficiency under it was however made the nodal authority for accrediting the agencies that certify green hydrogen, which is why this option is a plausible distractor. Option C is wrong because the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas deals with crude oil, refining and gas, and refineries will be customers for green hydrogen rather than its administrators. Option D is wrong because the environment ministry handles climate negotiations and forest and pollution law, not this mission.

The correct answer is B, one billionth of a metre. The prefix nano stands for ten raised to the power minus nine, so one nanometre is one billionth of a metre, which is also ten angstrom, and nanotechnology is defined as work in the band of one to one hundred nanometres. Option A is wrong because one millionth of a metre is a micrometre or micron, the unit used for bacteria and for the thickness of a hair in older textbooks, and it is a thousand times larger than a nanometre. Option C is wrong because one thousandth of a metre is a millimetre, a length visible to the eye on any ruler. Option D is wrong because one trillionth of a metre is a picometre, a unit used for bond lengths inside a molecule and a thousand times smaller than a nanometre; the diameter of an atom is of the order of a hundred picometres.

The correct answer is B, the Department of Science and Technology. The Nano Mission, formally the Nano Science and Technology Mission, was launched in 2007 under the Department of Science and Technology, which had already been running the Nano Science and Technology Initiative since 2001, and the mission works on basic research, human resources, infrastructure and the transfer of results to industry. Option A is wrong because the Defence Research and Development Organisation funds defence oriented materials work but does not run the Nano Mission. Option C is wrong because the Department of Atomic Energy looks after nuclear power, reactors and institutions such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology handles electronics manufacturing and digital programmes, which only overlaps with nanotechnology at the chip.

The correct answer is B, factoring large integers. Peter Shor published the algorithm in 1994, and it would let a sufficiently large quantum computer break the large number factorisation on which public key encryption such as the RSA system depends. That threat is the reason governments and standards bodies have begun work on post quantum cryptography. Option A is wrong because searching an unsorted database is the task of Grover's algorithm, published by Lov Grover in 1996, which gives a quadratic rather than an exponential speedup. Option C is wrong because sorting is not a problem on which quantum computers hold any celebrated advantage. Option D is wrong because image compression is a classical signal processing task with no quantum algorithm of this importance. Keep the pair clear: Shor factors, Grover searches.

The correct answer is B, Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition. SIGHT is the largest component of the mission, with an outlay of seventeen thousand four hundred ninety crore rupees, and it has two parts: incentives for manufacturing electrolysers in India and incentives for producing green hydrogen, both awarded through competitive bidding. Options A, C and D are wrong because they are invented expansions of the same four letters, built from words that sound plausible in an energy scheme. Full forms of mission acronyms are asked exactly as notified, so the safe method is to remember the four key words of this one, strategic, interventions, green hydrogen and transition, and to reject any expansion that replaces interventions with incentives, subsidy or support. The two parts of SIGHT are often asked separately as well, so remember that one window funds electrolyser manufacturing capacity in India and the other funds the production of green hydrogen itself.

The correct answer is A, PARAM Ganga. PARAM Ganga was set up at IIT Roorkee in 2022 under the second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission, and it was designed and installed by C-DAC. Phase II of the mission is the stage at which the server boards began to be manufactured in India instead of being imported ready made, so machines of this phase mark an important step in self reliance. The naming pattern of the mission attaches a familiar Indian name to the host institution, and Ganga suits Roorkee, which stands in the Ganga basin of Uttarakhand.

Option B, PARAM Bheem, is not a system of this mission at Roorkee. Option C, PARAM Yuva, belongs to an earlier generation of C-DAC machines at Pune, where PARAM Yuva II was commissioned in 2013, well before the mission began. Option D, PARAM Yamuna, is a plausible sounding river name but no such machine was installed at IIT Roorkee.

The correct answer is A, nickel and titanium. Nitinol is an alloy of roughly equal parts nickel and titanium, and even its name records this, being formed from nickel, titanium and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory where it was developed. Heated above a transition temperature it returns to a shape it was trained to remember, and it is also superelastic, which is why it is used in arterial stents, orthodontic wires, spectacle frames and actuators. Option B is wrong because nickel and tin form ordinary plating and bearing alloys with no shape memory effect. Option C is wrong because niobium and tantalum are refractory metals used in superconducting magnets and capacitors respectively, and their alloys are not shape memory materials. Option D is wrong because nickel and tungsten alloys are chosen for hardness and for high temperature strength instead.

The correct answer is A, transesterification. In transesterification a vegetable oil or animal fat is made to react with methanol or ethanol in the presence of an alkaline catalyst such as potassium hydroxide, giving fatty acid methyl esters, which are biodiesel, and glycerol as the by-product. Option B is wrong because fractional distillation is how crude petroleum is separated into petrol, kerosene and diesel; it separates an existing mixture instead of making a new ester. Option C is wrong because hydrogenation adds hydrogen across double bonds and is the process that turns liquid oils into vanaspati. Option D is wrong because fermentation is the anaerobic action of yeast on sugars, which is how ethanol and not biodiesel is produced. Pure biodiesel is designated B100, a five per cent blend is B5, and the alkaline catalyst commonly used in the reaction is potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide.

The correct answer is A, Electricity and water. A fuel cell converts the chemical energy of hydrogen directly into electrical energy without combustion, so it is not bound by the efficiency limit of a heat engine. Hydrogen is oxidised at the anode, the electrons pass through the external circuit as current, and at the cathode they combine with oxygen from the air to give water, with some heat released as well. Option B is wrong because there is no carbon anywhere in the reaction, which is exactly why hydrogen is attractive as a fuel. Option C is wrong because oxides of nitrogen form when air is burnt at high temperature in an engine, and a fuel cell has no flame and no such high temperature. Option D is wrong because hydrogen peroxide is not the product of this cell; water is, and the cell stops working if it is flooded with it.

The correct answer is B, the Airports Authority of India. GAGAN stands for GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation and was developed by ISRO together with the Airports Authority so that civil aircraft in Indian airspace get position information accurate and reliable enough for approach and landing. It does not have navigation satellites of its own; it broadcasts corrections that improve the signals already available.

Option A, the Indian Air Force, uses satellite navigation but is not the partner in this civil aviation project. Option C, the India Meteorological Department, works on weather and uses satellite data of a different kind. Option D, the Directorate General of Shipping, deals with merchant shipping, and marine users are served by NavIC rather than by GAGAN. The distinction worth carrying into the hall is that NavIC provides signals while GAGAN only corrects them.

The correct answer is B, mercury. In 1911 the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who had already liquefied helium, cooled mercury to about four kelvin and found that its electrical resistance vanished completely, which is the discovery of superconductivity and won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913. Option A is wrong because lead was shown to be superconducting soon afterwards, in 1913, so it is a later confirmation and the classic distractor here. Option C is wrong because niobium, although the elemental superconductor with the highest critical temperature and the material of most superconducting magnets, was identified much later. Option D is wrong because tin too followed mercury. A superconductor also expels a magnetic field from its interior, the Meissner effect, which makes a magnet levitate above it.

The correct answer is C, fourth. The Soviet Union was the first to place a craft gently on the lunar surface, the United States followed, and China became the third. India joined them on 23 August 2023 with the landing of the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan 3. India also became the first country of any to land in the south polar region, which is the separate record often asked in the same paper.

Option A, second, and option B, third, understate the position and belong to the United States and China. Option D, fifth, overstates it. Keep the two claims apart in memory: fourth country to soft land anywhere on the Moon, and first country to land near the lunar south pole. A question may test either, and the wording will tell you which.

The correct answer is B, An energy carrier. Free hydrogen does not occur in any usable quantity on earth, so it has to be made from water or from a hydrocarbon by spending energy, and it then stores and delivers that energy elsewhere. That is the definition of a carrier, like electricity. Option A is wrong because a primary source is one found in nature and used as it is, such as sunlight, wind, flowing water, coal or uranium; hydrogen has to be manufactured first. Option C is wrong because a fossil fuel is formed from buried organic matter over geological time, and although grey hydrogen is made from natural gas, hydrogen itself is not a fossil fuel. Option D is wrong because hydrogen is a gas and not a mineral, and no mineral is renewable in this sense.

The correct answer is B, Bengaluru. The Human Space Flight Centre, set up in 2019 as the ISRO centre responsible for the Gaganyaan programme, works from Bengaluru, which is also the location of the ISRO headquarters, the U R Rao Satellite Centre and the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network.

Option A, Thiruvananthapuram, is the home of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, where launch vehicles are developed, and of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre at Valiamala. Option C, Ahmedabad, is the home of the Space Applications Centre and of the Physical Research Laboratory founded by Vikram Sarabhai. Option D, Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, is the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, the launch site, and Gaganyaan will lift off from there even though the programme is directed from Bengaluru.

The correct answer is B, quantum dots. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 2023 went to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, semiconductor nanocrystals whose emitted colour depends on their size because of quantum confinement, and which are used in television displays, in light emitting diodes and as biological markers. Option A is wrong because graphene was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physics, not Chemistry, in 2010. Option C is wrong because carbon nanotubes, reported by Sumio Iijima in 1991, have never been the subject of a Nobel Prize, although the related fullerenes won the Chemistry prize in 1996. Option D is wrong because aerogels, first made by Samuel Kistler in 1931, have also never carried a Nobel Prize of their own.

The correct answer is B, VELC. The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph is the largest and the principal instrument aboard Aditya-L1. A coronagraph creates an artificial eclipse inside the instrument by covering the bright disc of the Sun, so that the faint outer atmosphere called the corona becomes visible. VELC can observe the corona close to the solar surface and study how coronal mass ejections begin, which is the key to understanding space weather.

Option A, SUIT, is the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, which photographs the Sun in ultraviolet light and studies the layers below the corona. Option C, HEL1OS, is the high energy X-ray spectrometer that records the hard X-rays of solar flares. Option D, ASPEX, is the particle experiment that samples the solar wind arriving at the spacecraft. All four are genuine payloads of the mission, so the question turns on which one is the chief instrument.

The correct answer is B, India. The International Solar Alliance was launched jointly by India and France at the Paris climate conference on 30 November 2015 to bring together countries lying largely between the tropics, and its headquarters is at Gwal Pahari in Gurugram, Haryana. It is the first headquarters of an international intergovernmental organisation to be located in India. Option A is wrong because France is the co-founder of the alliance but not its seat. Option C is wrong because the United Arab Emirates hosts the International Renewable Energy Agency at Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which is a different body and a common source of confusion. Option D is wrong because Germany hosts the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at Bonn, again a different organisation.

The correct answer is C, 2023. Chandrayaan-3 was launched on 14 July 2023 on an LVM3 rocket, and its lander Vikram touched down near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023, releasing the rover Pragyan. India thus became the fourth country to make a soft landing on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China, and the first to land in the south polar region, which interests scientists because water ice may survive in its shadowed craters. The day is now observed as National Space Day.

Option A, 2019, is the year of Chandrayaan-2, whose orbiter still works but whose lander was lost. Option B, 2021, saw no Indian lunar landing. Option D, 2024, is after the event. The pair to remember is Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 without a landing and Chandrayaan-3 in 2023 with one.

The correct answer is C, the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer built it at the IBM laboratory in Zurich in 1981; a sharp metal tip is moved a fraction of a nanometre above a conducting surface and the quantum tunnelling current between tip and sample maps the atoms one by one, work that brought them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Option A is wrong because the Scanning Electron Microscope images surface shape at far lower resolution and cannot resolve single atoms. Option B is wrong because the Atomic Force Microscope came in 1986, after the tunnelling microscope, though it has the advantage of working on insulators as well. Option D is wrong because the Transmission Electron Microscope, built by Ernst Ruska in the nineteen thirties, looks through thin specimens instead of scanning a surface.

The correct answer is B, a very high surface area to volume ratio. When a solid is divided into nanoparticles its total surface area grows enormously while the mass stays the same, so a very large fraction of the atoms lies exposed on the surface with unsatisfied bonds; chemical reactions happen at surfaces, so reactivity and catalytic activity rise sharply, which is why gold is inert as a bar but catalytic as nanoparticles. Option A is wrong because a lowered melting point is itself a consequence of the same surface effect, not the cause of the reactivity. Option C is wrong because the density of a nanoparticle is essentially that of the bulk material and does not drive reactivity. Option D is wrong because the atoms are unchanged in size; only the particle is smaller.